I think you are so right. The whip system needs to go too. You can’t take advantage of the diversity of parties if the merest infringement of government discipline brings the government to an end. You need government to reflect the diversity of opinion in the electorate and parties.
It’s why the system in Ireland is maddening.
This is the trickiest one I see. Not that any electoral reform is on the agenda for the next generation (thanks LDs). This is turning into an essay, because I’m in a mood with politics right now.
The whip sits within party dicipline. As it stands, playing nicely with the party is key to being selected, or getting a safe seat. I was musing earlier that unless you’ve sold your childhood to the party you can basically forget Westminster.
Wider electoral reform might work by weakening the parties, and making each party not a de-facto coalition.
To keep it appropriately apolitical I’ll refer to the red team and the blue team, and despite it being the UK thread you can think of Lab/Tory or Rep/Dem.
In Westminster and pretty much all of North America, there’s a 2 party system, and almost everyone lives in a safe seat. Take my MP - he has no background connecting him to the area, has abandoned his local office, but party loyalty got him the gift of a safe(ish) seat. As it stands, he owes more to the party than to his constituency, and this is bad and wrong.
Wider electoral reform should give us far more parties. If the blue team says “yeah, you look the part, but you voted against us on tihs issue” you can form the Blue party in direct opposition to the blue party without fear of splitting the vote.
The blue team is in government. The entire blue team is expected to follow the government line, whether it agrees with their faction or not. This reinforces the 1st point - the blue team was elected on a party manifesto, so who cares what the individual thinks?
With (anything but FPTP) we’d have more parties, and the first order of business would be forming a coalition. If right now two factions within the blue party would rather shank each other than run the country, there’d be something like one party per faction - some coalition could be made.
Explicitly going back to UK - the media I follow is speculating whether Sunak will fall once his 12 months are up because there’s so many factions within the Tory party trying to pull in opposite directions and each thinking they can get what they want if they issue ultimatums.
In a 2 party system, those factions are fucked. They can stay under their red/blue banner and try to sieze control of their team, or at least the agenda of the team. I’d say that swapping sides like what was common in Churchil’s early days is political suicide because they’re supposedly opposites, but I’m keen enough to write this essay of a reply and I couldn’t say what Starmer actually stands for. In reality, point 1 would mean it’s political suicide to swap between the two teams.
Forming a new party is equally career-ending. I can’t remember if it was TIG or TAG, but they disappeared quickly. Truss represents a philosophy that used to belong inside the Whigs that became the LDs, but is now entirely a faction inside the Tories.
If each faction was a party held together only by shared ideals, I could vote in line with my ideals not against the worse option. Party dicipline would be unnecessary (outside of a coalition) - if there was consensus on how a vote alinged with their ideals there would be no need for discipline. If there was no concensus then either they could behave like adults and agree it was a free vote, or in the extreme they could split into 2 or 3 parties.
2a. Backroom deals are bad, mkay
Back to Westminster, the 1922 committee handles keeping the various factions of the backbench parlimentary Tory party together. The PM handles keeping their government together, especially with cabinet meetings. All this is backroom.
A real coalition should be transparent. The Con/Dem coalition is a perfect illustration of backroom deals, collective responsibility fucking the junior partner. The LDs took major political fire for being in bed with the Tories, while the Tories looked nicer than they wanted to be for legalising same-sex marriage.
Collective responsibility mean that the LDs couldn’t say “we seriously twisted Cameron’s arm to get same-sex marriage on the table”.
Result? The AV referrendum turned into a de-facto opinion poll on the LDs, the next election saw them destroyed.
For the sake of argument, imagine a system more sympathetic to coalitions than we have, but the same seats as 2010. The LDs could go “we’ve got same-sex marriage on the agenda. Hey, Labour, SNP, are you willing to join up on this one? Yes? Right, Conservatives, we have the votes to make it pass, so you can either join us in the 21st century or sit there in the 19th.”.
Disagreeing on a single issue shouldn’t be enough to break a coalition, but forcing conformity on all issues is broken.
As Lessig writes for the USA, we both have populations of millions, but our leaders only need to listen to a very small number of people. We have a serious democratic defecit.
So, a further update on the whole “crumbling school buildings” thing.
It turns out that a lot of the schools that need repairs were supposed to be rebuilt, but that spending was cancelled back when the current government got into power:
Then the Westminster education minister vainly tried to spin the situation:
Which got a fairly derisive response:
Another by-election on top of Mad Nad’s.
Some actual non-terrible news for once, even if it is only bandaging a self-inflicted wound:
Good ridddance. Next, let’s hear some charges.
But I think you know I have to: something, something, nominative determinism…
PoliticsJoe’s podcast made the comparison to ULEZ. 90+% of schools unaffected by RAAC, nothing to see here. 90%+ of cars/households in Lon unaffected by ULEZ, OMG the sky is falling.
It just goes to show their sense of priorities: children with unsafe buildings potentially collapsing on them- meh, don’t care. Some drivers temporarily inconvenienced- absolute meltdown.
My God, it’s Scarfolk Council in real life!
Oh yeah, there was a godawful stink from a lot of gammons, but there was also some valid criticism, modified cars for people with disabilities are really expensive, and the help they gave was a bit weak. Same with lots of charities, and sole traders.
Obviously, this is more of a finger pointed at government policy in respect to welfare and benefits than at Khan’s mayorship…
The Electoral Commission is about to release a report on the effects of the new requirement for photo ID to vote, and it’s set to contain some rather unsurprising observations:
It’s sitting there unread. I did ask a couple of “senior Sinn Fein figures” about it and they were pretty grumpy. I like Aoife Moore, she was a breath of fresh air when she took over the political desk at the Examiner but kind of disappeared a bit when she went to the Times (more money, lower circulation for the Irish edition) and then they downsized her. Her closest replacement wrote a pretty misogynistic review of this book. The conversation drifted to slagging dodgy journalists so I didn’t get specifics of grievances Sinn Féin have, but they are pretty expert at bearing grudges.
Ugh. Some actually sensible policies (an EU reciprocity deal that actually commits the UK to taking its share of refugees) wrapped in the vilest and laziest of rhetoric packages (un-British, eh?).
There’s also this:
Labour is also promising to fast-track decisions on applications from “safe” countries, namely Albania and India, and create temporary “Nightingale asylum courts” to speed up legal challenges.
What would Florence Nightingale think that they’re now using her name and idea of temporary hospitals for f…ing kangaro courts?
She’d probably be cool with it.
